The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History
April 18, 2011
A promising NASA recruit throws everything away for a girl, illustrating the fascinating consequences when science, ambition, and starry-eyed love collide. In bestselling author Mezrich's telling, Thad Roberts, while at the University of Utah, became determined to be an astronaut and threw himself into science courses. He left his wife behind when he was accepted to the elite Johnson Space Center Cooperative Program in Houston, the training ground for NASA scientists. Despite his lack of an engineering background, Roberts excelled in the life sciences department. While cataloguing samples, he noticed the moon rocks NASA categorized as "trash"âsamples returned after experiments. Then Roberts met and fell in love with a new recruit, Rebecca, and planned to give her the moon, or at least its profits, by stealing the "used" moon rocks. Roberts devised the heist and arranged an online sale with a mineral collector in Belgium. The suspicious buyer alerted the FBI, which set up a sting, and Roberts was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. Mezrich (The Accidental Billionaires, from which The Social Network was adapted) has perfected his intensely readable brand of nonfiction: talented, often unscrupulous, young people skyrocketing to the top only to tumble back to earth.
September 26, 2011
Thad Roberts is a brilliant, thrill-seeking NASA employee who goes rogue and—along with a few accomplices—makes it his personal mission to break into an impregnable government laboratory and steal a hunk of lunar rock to impress his girlfriend and possibly make a little money on the side. Surprisingly, narrator Casey Affleck offers only a middling performance. His pronunciation of words frequently proves challenging for the listener and his tone is too melancholy for Mezrich’s history of this madcap and thrilling heist. Additionally, Affleck’s narration often registers as mannered and melodramatic. Still, his performance has its finer moments. Affleck is at his best reading the letters written by Thad during his incarceration, which allow him to create and occupy a character. A Doubleday hardcover.